Community college completion rates are extremely low, especially among low-income students. One potential explanation is that low-income students have limited capacity to overcome financial shocks, such as large medical, legal, or car repair bills. Some programs offer “emergency financial assistance” (EFA) to prevent these events from curtailing educational progress. We test the efficacy of EFA…

In an important and sad new paper Meyer et al. demonstrate the phenomena in a series of 16 experiments which show that unease with experiments is replicable and general. The authors, for example, ask 679 people in a survey to rate the appropriateness of three interventions designed to reduce hospital infections. The three interventions are:…

A record 220,300 public school teachers reported that they were physically attacked by a student during the 2015-2016 school year, according to a report jointly published this month by the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The data for 2015-16 comes from the NCES’s National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS).…

Sounds like the administration is putting up a stiff resistance to this guy; it’s definitely not the time for a limp response. A torrent of penis drawings in different locations across the Virginia Tech campus last fall drew numerous bias complaints from students, leaving university administrators grappling for answers as to whether the university had…

There but for the grace of God go I: Back in January, the Urban Institute—a widely respected Washington think tank—published a statistic about student debt that pretty soon caught fire among economics journalists. Based on an analysis of federal data, its researchers concluded that 49 percent of all outstanding education loans belonged to highest-earning quarter…

From the abstract: There are a growing number of large-scale educational randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Considering their expense, it is important to reflect on the effectiveness of this approach. We assessed the magnitude and precision of effects found in those large-scale RCTs commissioned by the UK-based Education Endowment Foundation and the U.S.-based National Center for…

Students who can’t get into elite schools through the front door based on academic merit don’t change once they’re in class. They can’t do the work, and are generally uninterested in gaining the skills they need in order to do well. Exhibit A from the recent admissions corruption scandal is “social media celebrity” Olivia Jade…

Northwestern University and Duke University are holding our “main” week-long workshop on Research Design for Causal Inference – our 10th annual workshop — at Duke University in Raleigh-Durham. We invite you to attend. Our apologies for the length of this message. Main Workshop: Monday – Friday, August 12-16, 2019 We will also be holding an “Advanced” Workshop the following…

Avoid sending your children to college: besides the racism and rape culture, there is sauce. The bribery scandal has “just highlighted an incredibly dark side of what has become normative, which is making sure that your kid has the best, is exposed to the best, has every advantage — without understanding how disabling that can…

We stayed in Shinjuku, which is very big and a little bit crazy. Memory Lane, north of Shinjuku station. It’s now a big tourist spot, which means overpriced food. We managed a quick side trip to Kamakura. Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden Nishishinjuku On the way home